Argentine Congress For Beginners: Who Makes The Federal Laws

For those of us who have been closely watching Argentine Congress for years, especially if we've had the chance to spend some time inside, terms like "parliamentary period," "extraordinary sessions," or "extension," along with various "types of majorities" (simple, special, etc.), are part of our everyday vocabulary. Not to mention "rosca" (an Argentine slang term referring to political maneuvering and negotiation) or vote counting, which carry a much softer meaning than what resonates outside those walls. It is precisely this vocabulary that has widened the gap between representatives and the represented.

It's not that this gap didn't exist before. In fact, it’s likely that it was much larger than it is now. In an era of greater access to the daily lives of everyone (from the corner baker's reels making medialunas to the videos of the latest influencer star), legislators are not immune to the potential for mockery on social media. In the case of the National Congress, with a capital 'C' (or the “House,” as those who spend their days there call it), the employees and advisors, the 257 deputies, and the 72 senators, plus the current vice president, seem to be caught in a conflict between hiding in a bunker with no contact with the outside world and fulfilling the democratic demand for greater transparency, all without turning the legislative process into a spectacle.

In this sort of "Congress for dummies" or "guide to becoming a legislator," I will try to cover the basics, the good, and the bad. From the Constitution to the regulations, the importance of experience and re-elections, how the electoral design results in a Congress that does not reflect federalism, and what other alternatives have existed throughout history. Everything you wanted to know about how Congress works but were too afraid to ask.

Starting from the beginning, and not in the Greek ekklesia but in the Constitution, which in 1853 had the still-liberal American experiment (pre-Civil War, I should clarify) as its ideal, we find that the men gathered in Santa Fe made six references to representatives and none to the represented, who are vaguely mentioned as “the People.” This People does not deliberate or govern except through its representatives:

Article 22.- The people do not deliberate or govern, but through their representatives and authorities created by this Constitution. Any armed force or gathering of people that claims the rights of the people and petitions in their name commits the crime of sedition.

While the represented are mentioned in the Preamble (because they are gathered by the will and election of the Provinces that make up the Confederation), Article 22 already mentions and gives substance to the representative and a good part of their role: to deliberate and govern.

Current legislators stand on the shoulders of giants. There is a certain nostalgia regarding the cursus honorum that past figures with enviable dialectical skills have had. The truth is (and here’s perhaps the first pill to swallow) that being a legislator is not easy. Speaking in front of your peers in full view of everyone and saying something substantial and profound takes practice and time. Some legislators prefer to speak little but are very industrious when it comes to presenting projects, while others utter grandiloquent words but don’t present much. This can be a strategy, even a division of tasks within the blocs. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of a team is important, and it also takes time; you’d be surprised to learn how many legislators from the same party see each other for the first time moments before taking their oath.

On the other hand, the entry of outsiders into politics (people not involved with the functioning of institutions) brings with it the cost of a lack of experience; an experience that is not necessarily impossible to acquire but will take time. Obviously, one can always coast along, but the most likely consequence will be not being re-elected, a determining factor—precisely—for gaining experience.

Throughout the second part of the Constitution, the characteristics of the authorities of the Nation are established, and the first authority described is the Legislative Power. Yes, authority, which is no small thing for a power that does not manage and whose role, generically speaking, is to debate and enact laws and, of course, to represent. It is clear that it has more functions: to elect members of the Supreme Court, approve ambassadors, negotiate federal judges, etc., but one of the reasons why Congress remains among the institutions with the worst image is that it does not manage in front of society, and it has to do the dirty work of legislating.

In December 2023, I was present during the swearing-in of the new deputies. Chatting with a former mayor who was taking office as a deputy, I remember predicting a long and complex adaptation period for him. It’s not easy to go from governing to being just one of many and having to discuss and fight for support for a project while reviewing thousands of projects from other deputies, participating in commissions that seem to discuss nothing, etc. Shortly after taking office, he took his complaint to social media; but what he saw as an anachronistic functioning is actually a feature not a bug. Congress is designed to slow down decisions, weigh them, and even delay them for better evaluation. It may not be its greatest virtue, but it is still its function. That said, it comes at a cost to its image.

In the regulations of the Chamber of Deputies, which a recently elected deputy rightly described as tedious (it’s very hard to understand something just from the regulations; think of the times you’ve picked up a board game, read the instructions, and said, "well, let’s do a trial run and see how it goes, this is quite complex"), there are proposed ways to streamline its functioning, shortcuts, and agreements that prevent certain topics from going through the chamber or mechanisms for some projects to be voted on with little debate. However, there are also many things that hinder a more expedient functioning. With a superpopulation of 46 permanent advisory committees in the Deputies (the Senate is not far behind: 27 permanent, and the special ones are around 34) that specialize in different themes, projects that are sent to a multitude of them, and committee plenaries that end up with almost 50% of the deputies discussing projects (altering the nature of treating them in a specialized body), there is no way to optimize time. Added to this, the control typically exercised by the ruling party over the committees informally called "governability" (Budget, General Legislation, Constitutional Affairs, etc.) often indirectly gives the Executive the ability to manage legislative timing, as there is no obligation to meet in committee. This is why there has been a recent tendency to call sessions solely to convene committees and thus force their meetings.

On the other hand, there is the Parliamentary Labor Committee, made up of the president of the Chamber, the vice presidents, and the leaders of the blocs, which has not functioned as such for years outside of a WhatsApp group (and I’ve been told not even that). If my calculations are correct, the last ordinary session (not informative) was at the beginning of 2019. This “malfunctioning” increases discretion and reduces the necessary exchange between the blocs, also known as “rosca.”

Rosca is an extremely necessary art in a collegial body like Congress. Even if there is disagreement, even if it serves for later jabs, the functioning is worse without that necessary exchange. One of the reasons for having deputies and senators confined in a single building is precisely so they can cross paths, get to know each other, and interact. In times when political poles are becoming more extreme, that interaction is even more necessary. Personally, I believe that the bad reputation of agreements (rosca) has overshadowed the committee meetings, now broadcast live, turning them into a place for solidifying positions rather than a space for rapprochement.

Moreover, one of the points that definitely makes Congress a pariah in public opinion is the dynamics of the sessions. Recently, Miguel Ángel Pichetto, more accustomed to the Senate (where sessions are more agile), complained that in the Deputies everyone speaks. The regulations are designed for few to participate, primarily the so-called informing members and bloc representatives; but at the same time, it is permeable to party disaggregation. When everyone speaks, the times are elongated. The same happens when the blocs multiply. The regulations are very generous with the time allotted to small blocs: with 20 blocs (as currently exist) and a minimum of 12 minutes (for each topic) for blocs of one to three members, sessions become unnecessarily long, tedious, and stretch into the early morning, because calling for a recess to continue at another time is an invitation for the session to fall apart due to lack of quorum.

As we noted earlier, understanding how a session unfolds solely from the regulations is insufficient. It requires time and years of experience. There are legislators who are quicker on the uptake and those who are not. Due to the low re-election rate, combined with the inexperience of outsiders, fewer and fewer know how to use the regulations, for better or worse. Moreover, those who pursue a career in politics are increasingly frowned upon. To cite an example, just the tool of motions (and the majorities needed) is a steep hill for anyone to climb.

It’s worth noting a couple of details that make our Congress special. On one hand, one of the peculiarities is that the Chamber of Deputies renews itself in halves, with each serving a four-year term. In the United States, whose Constitution was partially used as a framework for ours, "representatives" (the equivalent of our deputies) must reaffirm their mandate every two years, and they do so in single-member districts by state, unlike Argentina, where each province is a district and elections are by closed and blocked list, distributing the seats proportionally. This has not always been the format: we have gone through majority systems of seat distribution (where the winner kept all the seats or two-thirds of them), single-member systems like the American one (Law 4161 of 1902; not to be confused with the decree law 4161 of Aramburu that banned Peronism) that led to the election of the first socialist deputy on the continent in 1904, Alfredo Palacios. The current government flirted at one point with the idea of returning to the principles of the law promoted by Julio Argentino Roca in 1902 and reconfiguring the election of deputies to single-member districts, arguing for a closer relationship between representatives and represented and greater accountability.

On the other hand, there is another distinction of our Congress: perhaps the greatest sin for a political scientist, which is the underrepresentation and overrepresentation of districts. No one asks for it to be perfectly even or proportional, but Congress does neither well. In the United States, a sparsely populated state like Wyoming has one representative and two senators, as one chamber represents the people of the Nation and the other the States equally. This situation is repeated in Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont, and after each census, the redistribution of representatives is respected. For example, after the last census, California lost one representative and Florida gained one. In Argentina, censuses are not respected: the distribution is frozen at the 1980 census, therefore, the province of Buenos Aires has 70 deputies when it should have more than 100 (if maintaining the current 257). Additionally, decree law 22.514, commonly known as Bignone's law, establishes a minimum of five deputies for each province. This clashes with the regulation of one deputy for every 161,000 inhabitants, or fraction over half. Considering this proportion, Tierra del Fuego should have 1 deputy, to mention the extreme case, and the province of Buenos Aires 109, according to the last census. The solutions being considered are, on one hand, to increase the number of representatives (something that would likely have a negative impact on public opinion), or to reduce the number of deputies from many provinces (and redistribute the 257), which would limit the maneuvering room for less populated provinces.

All well and good with the history, but how do you identify a good legislator? It’s a difficult question to answer and comes with a trap. "If they are re-elected," could be one answer. But with blanket lists, someone who doesn’t measure up can slip through. Likewise, if we evaluate based on how much is spoken in the chamber, a statistic often used by the media, it encourages Pichetto's nightmare and talking just for the sake of talking (or to make a clip for social media). Of course, eloquence and the ability to convince others is no small matter. Another criterion for evaluation from specialized journalism is how many projects were presented, but this incentivizes the presentation of similar projects, and an inflation of resolutions and declarations that do not necessarily fulfill the role of representation. Former deputy Oscar Agost Carreño (whose term has ended) presented 127 bills between March 1, 2025, and the end of his term (almost one for every business day), only one was approved in the chamber and none received a committee report. It’s undeniable that that office worked hard, but how do you rate their results?

This has been a review of the main points that make Congress a place uncomfortable for many, denigrated and often gloomy. It remains the common place to offload blame onto the Executive (when things "don’t work"), the Judiciary (when they claim not to have the tools), or the media. Congress has aspects that can surely be improved, such as the uninominality of the districts we pointed out, the updating of the seats, or the stricter application of the regulations (or their modification to reduce the committees and acknowledge that with these compositions, the special is the norm). However, we cannot ask an institution designed to function in one way to operate in another, because when we do that, we end up forcing it, and if it bends, it breaks.